Jim is the co-founder of Stonehouse Standing Circle, an innovative public-engagement and communications think-tank, and the former chair of The Climate Project Canada—Al Gore’s global education and advocacy organization. He also led the Province of British Columbia’s Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Community Relations and First Nations Partnerships.

But while the High Park execs have majority control over the NRSP, it appears that they don't have to report its operations as part of their lobbying or account for who's paying for the NRSP's operations.

The first is the most obvious: with the Democrats having secured control in both Houses of Congress, the energy industry expects it will soon face an outbreak of climate-change regulations. Exxon wants to be in the room to negotiate the effect of those regulations; it wants to be taken seriously on this issue and admitting the accuracy of the science is a necessary first step.

One of the quickest ways to trigger a backlash of cynicism and suspicion in the climate change conversation is to insist that there is a “consensus” among scientists about human responsibility for global warming.

To begin, many people misunderstand the word “consensus.” Although the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a general agreement,” people tend to think that it means a unanimous agreement and, therefore, that if a single scientist stands up anywhere in the world and argues the point that the consensus is invalidated.

Today, December 1st, marks exactly a year since the DeSmogBlog went live, striking out to challenge those people who try to make climate change a political story – and not a scientific one.

They exist in abundance. Despite an overwhelming global consensus that human activity is causing climate change, there remains a small but well-funded core of deniers – people who will go to almost any length to cast doubt upon a scientific reality that grows more obvious, and more frightening, by the day.

A huge number of those people work for “think tanks” in the U.S. and Canada…

On a day when British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was urging India to join the fight against climate change, the country announced that it is throwing its lot in with the industry-oriented Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP).

The anti-KyotoAPP is an international body including Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. It has been presented as an alternative to the United Nations-sponsored Framework Convention on Climate Change, albeit one that rejects the notion of enforceable climate change measures such as those negotiated in the Kyoto Accord. Instead, the APP is dedicated to increasing GHG-causing industrial and energy development, promising only to improve the relative environmental cleanliness of those developments

The new public relations group calling itself the Natural Resources Stewardship Project is a classic example of an astroturf group - a surprisingly well-funded PR team that presents itself as a grassroots organization.

The new public relations group calling itself the Natural Resources Stewardship Project is a classic example of an astroturf group - a surprisingly well-funded PR team that presents itself as a grassroots organization.

NRSP (think: Not Really Science People) sets this out as it's First Priority Project:

Think about that for a minute. A true grassroots campaign occurs when a bunch of people who share an interest rise up spontaneously to fight for a common interest. Which of your neighbours might be inclined to rise up spontaneously to “counter the Kyoto Protocol and other greenhouse gas reduction schemes”? Conscientious objectors in the war on climate change don't join astroturf groups.

"Fossil-fuel companies have spent millions funding anti-global-warming think tanks, purposely creating a climate of doubt around the science. DeSmogBlog is the antidote to that obfuscation." ~ BRYAN WALSH, TIME MAGAZINE